I definitely think it's important to think about the embodied or visceral elements of literature--which is so difficult to bring to students within the classroom space.
The connections between drug addiction and creative writing are really interesting. There's definitely an element of obsessiveness for many writers--an almost physiological need to write, which is somewhat like addiction.
Distracting one's self from a current project and then coming back to it refreshed is a really good strategy, whether that involves going out into nature or something else.
As someone who participated in a read through of one of Stefanie's scripts, I saw first hand how useful it is. And then getting to see the final version performed, I could definitely see how she revised to solve some of the problems we identified.
I definitely agree with the letting a piece sit before revision technique. There are things I've written and then come back to over years. But it's also sometimes difficult to get that time, especially when a project has a deadline. I wonder how many pieces are sent out and even published before they could be "finished" because of deadlines.
Megan gives us so many great strategies. It's hard for me to pick a favorite. Letting it sit is a really good one. One thing that Megan mentions is emailing thoughts to a friend as part of the drafting process. Something as low stakes as emailing a friend might help get to the finish line a little faster when deadlines are looming.
It's been great working with Kari. It was fun being directed by her in It's A Wonderful Life, and I'm looking forward to directing her in Suite Surrender.
The strategy of trying to be open to things not being right and trying to find new approaches is a really good technique, though it's often hard for many people to let go of that initial idea.
I definitely agree that spending a lot of writing time not writing can be a great strategy. I spend a ton of my time just thinking about what I'm eventually going to put on the page, and so my first drafts tend to be pretty good. But yeah, this definitely doesn't work for everyone.
A perfect piece is a published piece. There's no metric for a "perfect" piece, because writing (creative or scholarly) isn't an objective thing with clear, concrete right and wrong.
It's seems to me like there's been a big upswing in people writing about maternity and maternity issues in the past couple of decades--particularly more literary writing, as opposed to medical or how-to type guides. But I'm also not sure whether that's just my perception because it isn't a genre I'm particularly familiar with.
I think a lot of people underestimate the benefit of deadlines--even self-imposed ones--for helping motivate productivity. Because deadlines can be a source of stress, many people (understandably) hate them, but they can be a good way to push a writer toward actually working on something.
Yes, deadlines can be a beneficial thing as long as those deadlines set a reasonable time frame. If the time expectation is too narrow, it can lead to a weaker final product full of errors that could have been avoided.
The new intro looks good. It's cool that Thomas is into hard science fiction, with a focus on being accurate and clear about the scientific details. I don't know much about science, but I do sometimes appreciate when authors take time to show how this world would actually work.
I appreciate what Lisa said about leaning in to those uncomfortable moments and just doing the thing--whether that be writing the hard story or starting a new document or making a conversation.
The focus on documentary poetry is really interesting. There's a lot of documentary theatre that works through similar issues about representation and truth.
In addition to meeting one's basic needs, I think it's great advice to read widely and bring anything and everything to one's own writing (or research, in my case) process.
The discussion of generic differences between prose/poetry and film is really interesting. We see the same kinds of things with theatre, where there's a whole component of imagining a play in performance that shapes the writing process in a way it simply doesn't with prose and poetry.
While the consideration of performance might seem quite different between film and poetry, I do see similarities when Pearl talks about the role of dialogue. And since poetry does build out of an oral tradition, we need to think about line breaks, how to read those line break, how to teach our audience to read those line breaks, word choice, rhythm, sound, and inflection. The language needs to seem authentic (in both genres) to the character (even if the character is just the narrative "I").
The shirt I’m wearing during my conversation with Pearl is a Centre Film Festival t-shirt. This year’s film festival (2022) t-shirts can be purchased here: centrefilm.org/merch-2022/.
As an ex DOD contractor, I enjoyed your insights. I entered this workforce by receiving a recommendation from a faculty member. I worked at ANSER in Virginia. Keep up the good work.
I don't normally write my essays by hand, but I often handwrite edits on typed drafts, and I often take notes for lesson plans by hand. Plus, I encourage my students to take notes by hand whenever they ask me about note taking.
In my video about the Star Trek episode "Charlie X," I argue that this is a disability-concerned episode, even though disability is not overtly represented: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-2tjffCS6QzU.html
The project on sci fi and apocalypse seems really interesting. Todd McGowan, a former professor of mine, wrote a book about disaster movies as giving humans a kind of control over the destruction of the world by externalizing the threat.
I think a lot of people really need some kind of external motivator to ensure productivity, whether that motivator is a reward or a deadline (which is what I set for myself). Even if that motivator is arbitrary, having that requirement can be super useful. Also, the new intro and the dress look good.
what joshua said about writing just short of a natural stopping point (like the end of the scene or chapter), i've found massively helpful in my own drafting process. incorporating his strategy has made it so much easier for me to return to pieces and move forward with them. it's helped so much with my production rate. :)
That issue of writing out into the void is definitely a concern a lot of us share. I suspect that fairly few people actually read what I write, so it's not clear how much of an impact my work has on the world. A big part of it is the super high expectations for getting a tenure track job today. Because there is so much competition for so few jobs, a candidate almost needs a dozen article publications just to be competitive, which produces a system where people write and publish just to try and get in the door, then to try and get tenure, etc. even apart from the question of whether this argument really moves the discipline forward.
That point about the difficulty of navigating a revise and resubmit is super important. One big issue I always worry about with revise and resubmits is what the editors/reviewers mean by "major changes" vs. "minor changes," which may not necessarily look like what I would mean by "major" or "minor changes." This is also something I worry about as a peer reviewer for scholarship--it might not be helpful for an author if what I conceptualize as minor changes might look like major changes to them.
As somebody who also frequently works on relatively obscure or non-canonical texts, I love the idea of scholarship as a place to unapologetically follow our interests.
I can't believe I left out Kevin Wetmore as one of the big scholarly influences on me. I basically want to be Kevin Wetmore (apart from the living in LA thing).
I also find it easier to do good revisions when I print out the draft and work on a physical copy. Though I use a pen--usually green ink--so it stands out against the black ink of the draft itself.
